I was browsing the FB group the other day (yeah, I admit to doing that from time to time), and stumbled upon this great idea (credit goes to Kurt Greenwald) for making a custom jog box for CM (or any other G-code sender for that matter), and I liked the concept so much that I had to try it (even though I have already spent WAY too much time prototyping various flavors of jogging pendants).
The idea is: purchase a set of arcade buttons and the associated gadget that will emulate a USB joystick, and then use the excellent joytokey software to define which keystroke you want to generate when a given button is pushed. No programming, no soldering, no hacking, it’s plug and play.
I bought this (rather expensive/overkill) set, but they can be had for 10 bucks or so.
I went to cut a panel from 0.18" plywood (by the way, I’m in love with my 1/8" compression endmills. 20.000RPM, 40ipm, single cut pass at 0.2", cuts like butter and leaves a very clean finish, no tearout)
A few other plywood parts later, the jogbox prototype #1 took its place where I intend to have it:
Wiring took all of 30 seconds, plugging each button into one slot of the USB stick, using the provided wires:
5 minutes later, I had setup a joytokey profile for Carbide Motion shortcuts:
the top four buttons are mapped to the four jog speeds (fast / 1mm / 0.1mm / 0.01mm), and the other buttons are mapped to X/Y/Z
And there you have it:
Now of course, you can also buy any USB keyboard or joystick and do the same, but where’s the fun in that?